On Tue, Feb 3, 2026 at 11:16 PM Steven Rostedt <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 3 Feb 2026 21:50:47 +0800
> Donglin Peng <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Testing revealed that sorting within resolve_btfids introduces issues with
> > btf__dedup. Therefore, I plan to move the sorting logic directly into
> > btf__add_enum_value and btf__add_enum64_value in libbpf, which are
> > invoked by pahole. However, it means that we need a newer pahole
> > version.
>
> Sorting isn't a requirement just something I wanted to bring up. If it's
> too complex and doesn't achieve much benefit then let's not do it.

Thanks for clarifying. Analysis shows most enum-type btf_type have
small vlen (78% ≤ 10, 95% ≤50), so I think that  linear search could
be acceptable.

>
> My worry is because "cat trace" takes quite a long time just reading the
> BTF arguments. I'm worried it will just get worse with enums as well.

The delay stems from `btf_find_by_name_kind`’s linear search over
vmlinux BTF (10k+ types). This was resolved by adding binary search
to `btf_find_by_name_kind` [1].

Performance tests [2] confirm the improvement:
1. Original funcgraph-retval:
# time cat trace | wc -l
101024

real    0m0.682s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.695s

2. Enhanced funcgraph-retval:
# time cat trace | wc -l
99326

real    0m12.886s
user    0m0.010s
sys     0m12.680s

3. Enhanced funcgraph-retval + optimizined btf_find_by_name_kind:
# time cat trace | wc -l
102922

real    0m0.794s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.810s

Binary search reduces overhead to near-negligible levels (0.794s vs. 12.886s).

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/[email protected]/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/

>
> I have trace-cmd reading BTF now (just haven't officially released it) and
> doing an extract and reading the trace.dat file is much faster than reading
> the trace file with arguments. I'll need to implement the enum logic too in
> libtraceevent.
>
> -- Steve

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